One of the most remarkable heroes of World War II, a French resistance fighter named Robert de La Rochefoucauld, is a virtual unknown in America.

But Paul Kix, in The Saboteur (Harper, $27.99), is shining a spotlight on the man's larger-than-life secret exploits.

Kix — a deputy editor at ESPN the Magazine (and a former North Texas resident who worked for the Dallas Observer and D Magazine more than a decade ago) — tells the true story of a young man from an aristocratic French family who became a thorn in the side of the occupying Nazis.

The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, by Paul Kix

(HarperCollins)

After France was overrun by German invaders in 1940, La Rochefoucauld was trained by England's top-secret Special Operations Executive in guerrilla tactics. He went back home to coordinate resistance efforts and to conduct bombing missions in factories and along railways. He was captured twice, but the Nazis could not hold him. The first time, after withstanding four months of torture, he got away just minutes before his appointment with a firing squad. During the second escape, he made his way to safety disguised as a nun.

"One day [in the spring of 2012] I was reading The New York Times and I saw his obituary," Kix remembers. "It was like, 'French saboteur who defied Nazis at every turn dead at 88.' I saved the obituary in a Gmail folder titled 'Book Ideas,' but I was reluctant to do anything with it."

His excuses not to write were good ones. Kix had just started a demanding job at ESPN. He and his wife had three small kids, and he knew a book project like this would require multiple overseas research trips. And perhaps the most daunting roadblock: Kix barely spoke a word of French.

"But all that summer," the author says, "there was this whisper in my head: 'This is the book you should be writing.' By October, I decided to pay attention to the voice and started work on it."

The result of his four years of labor reads like a too-good-to-be-true plot from an Alistair MacLean or Jack Higgins thriller. But the tales of derring-do all checked out as completely true.

Kix, whose book tour brings him to the Wild Detectives on Thursday, Dec. 28, talked by phone from New York City.

Why do you think La Rochefoucauld's story, which will be revelatory to many readers, isn't as widely known as, say, Normandy and Iwo Jima?

Robert de la Rochefoucauld, circa 1956.

(La Rochefoucauld family)

Unfortunately, there's a bit of a provincial outlook when it comes to America's view of history. We have such an Americanized view of the broad strokes of the war. We lose sight of the fact that there was valor everywhere. I did ask myself a time or two, "Will there be an American audience for this book?"

But there was a great book that came out when I was doing my research: All the Light You Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr. It's about a blind girl and occupied France. When it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015, I told myself, "Oh, there is an audience here for this."

Bottom line: If it's a really good story, that will transcend the tribalism that usually binds us.

Some of the medals won by Robert de la Rochefoucauld

(La Rochefoucauld family)

Reading La Rochefoucauld's exploits made me feel like a lightweight.

He made me feel like a lightweight too. The deeper I got into the research, the more I wondered, "What would I do if my nation were occupied by a foreign and frankly evil power? How would I respond?"

I doubt there are many of us who could measure up to this man.

What was one of the biggest surprises you discovered about life in WWII-era France?

One of the things I found interesting was the widespread paranoia that existed. In that climate, there was no way of knowing who was your friend and who was your enemy.

There was a show on Vichy-approved radio called Repetez-le, which means Repeat It, which literally was nothing more than Frenchmen sending in denunciatory proclamations on their friends, on their neighbors, sometimes on members of their own families.

Paul Kix

(HarperCollins/Beowulf Sheehan)

There is an episode in the book where Robert is walking through a village and thinking, "How do I interpret that smile? Does that person know who I really am? And if so, how long before I am turned in?" Pretty much everyone in France felt that way for five long years.